How Do You Know That?

The following is from a speech delivered by William Berkley—Chairman and CEO of insurance company W. R. Berkley Corporation—at the Haskins Awards Dinner sponsored by the NYU Stern Graduate School of Business. He puts forward a good question that should be reflected on more frequently.

The state of our minds is the most important fact of our existence. Reality matters, of course, but for us individually, it is our state of mind that determines our perception of reality.

My own state of mind leads to a constant question.... It is a question that every citizen should constantly ask: How do you know that?

Our contemporary world requires a healthy degree of skepticism. As society becomes more complex and process driven, it is important to be willing to ask questions—to be skeptical—if one is to gain understanding.

Educated people want to know how their knowledge is grounded. They want to know how they know what they know.

It is your confidence in what you know that determines your state of mind. And we live in a world where your state of mind determines your life.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Tripping Point

Successful people lose more than the average person because they keep trying. Yet it often only takes one success to outweigh the many failures. A successful person takes smart risks. Persistence and the ability to deal with disappointment and often rejection are key characteristics for the successful person.

In an upcoming book, Success Built to Last by authors Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery and Mark Thompson, they call the inevitable stumbles or failures on the way to success, tripping points. It is these tripping points that successful people “harvest.” “Success people “think of both success and failure as feedback. The question is not whether they won or lost this round, but what they will do with the feedback.”

They explain, “The bad news is that even when you’re doing your best, if you fail at any point, you’ll get harsh reviews. Think of the last time you got good press for bad news. … For much of the journey, innovation is hard work rewarded by bad headlines.

“This is just one more reason why people hide out from pursuing their full potential to follow their dreams and serve the world. Enduringly successful people aren’t immune. They just tolerate risks, feel the fear, take the brickbats, learn from failure, and do what matters to them anyway.”

Failures are inevitable. After you deal with them you must refocus your vision, learn from the failure and make new mistakes. The important thing is to keep moving forward. Successful people “become more resolute after losing a battle they believe in because they learn from the loss—it gives them a better idea of what matters, what works, and what doesn’t." They interviewed, among hundreds of others, retired Stanford professor James G. March who added this, “Short-term reality is an insult to the vision. You have to be self delusional to create change—it’s a useful craziness guided or founded on your clear identity and knowing what you must do.”

The book is an excellent survey of how enduringly successful people have made success happen. It will be released August 18 and can be preordered now. There are a lot of great nuggets in here worth taking a look at. We’ll look a few more of them in the days ahead.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Neuroscience of Leadership

Creating change and making it stick is the job of leaders. Making that happen is the trick. Change in an organization happens of course, behaviorally on an individual basis. But changing behavior is hard, even for individuals, and even when new habits can mean the difference between life and death. In many studies of patients who have undergone coronary bypass surgery, only one in nine people, on average, adopts healthier day-to-day habits.

David Rock, author of Quiet Leadership and Jeffrey Schwartz, a research psychiatrist at the School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles report in Strategy+Business that scientists have "gained a new, far more accurate view of human nature and behavior change because of the integration of psychology (the study of the human mind and human behavior) and neuroscience (the study of the anatomy and physiology of the brain). As a result, researchers have found hitherto unseen neural connections in the living human brain. Advanced computer analysis of these connections has helped researchers develop an increasing body of theoretical work linking the brain (the physical organ) with the mind (the human consciousness that thinks, feels, acts, and perceives)."

Several conclusions about organizational change can be drawn from the research that make the art and craft of management far more effective:

• Change is pain. Organizational change is unexpectedly difficult because it provokes sensations of physiological discomfort.
• Behaviorism doesn’t work. Change efforts based on incentive and threat (the carrot and the stick) rarely succeed in the long run.
• Humanism is overrated. In practice, the conventional empathic approach of connection and persuasion doesn’t sufficiently engage people.
• Focus is power. The act of paying attention creates chemical and physical changes in the brain.
• Expectation shapes reality. People’s preconceptions have a significant impact on what they perceive.
• Attention density shapes identity. Repeated, purposeful, and focused attention can lead to long-lasting personal evolution.

Here is the pivotal finding with important implications:

Concentrating attention on your mental experience, whether a thought, an insight, a picture in your mind’s eye, or a fear, maintains the brain state arising in association with that experience. Over time, paying enough attention to any specific brain connection keeps the relevant circuitry open and dynamically alive. These circuits can then eventually become not just chemical links but stable, physical changes in the brain’s structure.

Cognitive scientists have known for 20 years that the brain is capable of significant internal change in response to environmental changes, a dramatic finding when it was first made. We now also know that the brain changes as a function of where an individual puts his or her attention. The power is in the focus.

Attention continually reshapes the patterns of the brain. Among the implications: People who practice a specialty every day literally think differently, through different sets of connections, than do people who don’t practice the specialty. In business, professionals in different functions — finance, operations, legal, research and development, marketing, design, and human resources — have physiological differences that prevent them from seeing the world the same way.

What does this mean on a practical level? The effect lasting change then focusing on the problem only ingrains it in the mind. Based on what we know now the focus should be on the new behavior. The process begins by painting a broad picture of the goal, without specifically identifying the changes that individuals will need to make. Then the leader should help his team to picture the new behaviors in their own minds, and in the process develop energizing new mental maps that have the potential to become hardwired circuitry. The leader would then get their team to focus their attention on their own insights, by facilitating discussions and activities that point toward the goal. After that, the job would be to regularly provide “gentle reminders” so that the new behavioral maps become the dominant pathways along which information, ideas, and energy flow. The leader also needs to catch the team when they get sidetracked and gently bring them back. The power truly is in the focus, and in the attention that is paid.

Perhaps you are thinking, “This all sounds too easy. Is the answer to all the challenges of change just to focus people on solutions instead of problems, let them come to their own answers, and keep them focused on their insights?” Apparently, that’s what the brain wants. And some of the most successful management change practices have this type of principle ingrained in them.

As Peter F. Drucker said, “We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.” In the knowledge economy, where people are being paid to think, and with constant change, there is more pressure than ever to improve how we learn. Perhaps these findings about the brain can start to pull back the curtain on a new world of productivity improvement: in our ability to bring about positive, lasting change in ourselves, in our families, in our workplaces, and in society itself.

Luc de Brabandere's The Forgotten Half of Change: Achieving Greater Creativity through Changes in Perception is also good in this regard.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If It's Important, Pay Attention

A new press release from UCLA reports that multi-tasking affects the brain's learning systems, and as a result, we do not learn as well when we are distracted. "Multi-tasking adversely affects how you learn," said Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. "Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily. Our study shows that to the degree you can learn while multi-tasking, you will use different brain systems.

"The best thing you can do to improve your memory is to pay attention to the things you want to remember," Poldrack added. "Our data support that. When distractions force you to pay less attention to what you are doing, you don't learn as well as if you had paid full attention."

Tasks that require more attention, such as learning calculus or reading Shakespeare, will be particularly adversely affected by multi-tasking. "Our results suggest that learning facts and concepts will be worse if you learn them while you're distracted," Poldrack said.

The researchers noted that they are not saying never to multi-task, just don't multi-task while you are trying to learn something new that you hope to remember. Listening to music can energize people and increase alertness. Listening to music while performing certain tasks, such as exercising, can be helpful. But tasks that distract you while you try to learn something new are likely to adversely affect your learning, Poldrack said.

This isn't startling information but it is nice to have it reaffirmed. We live in a world where we often find ourselves having to multi-task, but we should be aware of this. We just aren't going to be as effective. Poldrack suggested that a silent environment is not necessarily essential. Music, for instance, can help in learning because it can make the individual happier. But in general, distraction should be avoided.

Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Human Resources

Here are a couple of links to articles pertaining to your people: Avoiding the Stress of Generation Why Companies are just beginning to wake up to the havoc that the newest generation of workers is causing in offices across the globe. And adapt they must, because it is they who will dominate the workforce for the next 70 years or so. Quote: "Millennials are not looking for career paths - they are looking for life paths." From: Management-Issues Waking Up on the Wrong Side of the Desk: The Effect of Mood on Work Performance While a lot of research has been done in the past two decades on work-family conflicts, few studies have looked closely at how mood affects workers' performance. Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard and co-author Steffanie Wilk wanted to find out which mood-altering events have the biggest effect, if any -- those that influence one's outlook at the start of the day, or those that nudge one's mood up or down as the workday advances. Among their key findings: The mood you bring with you to work has a stronger effect on the day's mood—and on work performance—than mood changes caused by events in the workplace. From: Knowledge@Wharton * * *

Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)